Birth of Another Spectacle, and Its Life

Image

A scene from the Babylonian sequence of D. W. Griffith’s “Intolerance.”CreditCreditPhotofest, via Film Forum

By Nicolas Rapold

July 26, 2013

Both admired and reviled, D. W. Griffith’s 1915 feature “The Birth of a Nation” still occupies an unusual position in American cinema. When it was released, its unnervingly compelling account of star-crossed Civil War families and the Ku Klux Klan was the subject of protests and censorship battles. After all that, you might expect a filmmaker to be taken down a notch.

But with his next feature, “Intolerance,” Griffith confronted criticism head-on as only an artist intoxicated by his chosen medium could: with bolder filmmaking, bigger stories and, of course, giant elephant statues and throngs of Babylonian dancers.

Griffith’s project was a major step in 1916, when the feature-length film was still in its infancy. Four tales across history are told in dizzying and masterly alternation, all linked by the broad themes of intolerance and hatred. The kingdom of Babylon battles Persian invaders in 539 B.C.; Catherine de’ Medici instigates the slaughter of the Huguenots in 16th-century France; and, in a modern tale that had its origins in a film by Griffith, a slum couple with a baby struggle against nosy reformers and murder charges. Tale No. 4 belonged to Jesus, and in terms of screen time, he’s almost an afterthought.

Part 1 climaxes with Babylon repelling a siege with a flame-throwing juggernaut and some impalements and decapitations. Part 2, after the intermission, breathlessly crosscuts among a car racing to cut off a train, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre and Round 2 of Babylon versus Persia.

All this is on view in a crisp, freshly scored 167-minute restoration of the film, beginning a weeklong run Friday at Film Forum in the South Village. The poignant, the brutal, the hair-raising and the sentimental churn together in meticulously composed spectacles, shot by Griffith’s innovative cameraman Billy Bitzer.

Image

Griffith on the set of the movie.CreditPhotofest, via Film Forum

But for all its excesses and technical and formal achievements, “Intolerance” remains less known than its inflammatory predecessor. It’s often described as Griffith’s cinematic apology for “Birth of a Nation,” which makes it sound like the most expensive community service ever undertaken.

The truth of Griffith’s motives is a bit more complicated. Brute success, for one thing, paved the way for “Intolerance,” or at least its size. “The Birth of a Nation” grossed a fortune, even with hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills relating to censorship. Neither the filmmaker nor the producer in Griffith, then a 40-year-old Kentucky-born autodidact, was likely to give up.

“He didn’t feel he had anything to apologize for,” Kevin Brownlow, the silent-film historian who interviewed some of Griffith’s collaborators, said by telephone from England.

While it might be more comforting to imagine “Intolerance” as a mea culpa, the film is more of a j’accuse. Griffith’s editing draws parallels between the reformers in the contemporary story and the hypocrites ready to stone an adulteress in the Jesus thread. And in a biting coincidence, the charitable organization trying to help the young mother is financed by a Rockefeller-style industrialist who brutally breaks up a strike at the mills where her father works.

It’s a heady subtext to a film that already has a lot going on, but Griffith’s beliefs can’t obscure his accomplishments. Any viewer expecting just another busy, maudlin Cecil B. DeMille-type epic may be surprised. The profusion of action, foreground and background, often in rapid shots, contains multitudes. In a matter of minutes, Catherine de’ Medici smiles grimly at the slaughter she has initiated, voluptuous maidens awaken in a dreamy temple, a man is shot down with his dead lover in his arms, and a convict in dire straits communes with God.

“Events are not set forth in their historical sequence or according to the accepted forms of dramatic construction,” Griffith wrote at the time, “but as they might flash across a mind seeking to parallel the life of the different ages.” The multiple narratives of “Intolerance” reflect what “the mind might do while contemplating such a theme.”

Video

A preview for the restoration of D. W. Griffith's film.Published OnJuly 26, 2013

Griffith’s ambition inspired filmmakers on and off the production. Erich von Stroheim, Tod Browning and Allan Dwan all worked on the movie. (Dwan designed a towering elevator dolly for a sprawling Babylon shot.) Carl Theodor Dreyer made his own multi-epoch story with “Leaves From Satan’s Book”; Eisenstein was impressed by the technical accomplishment (but thought the American’s montage was all wrong); and Buster Keaton’s “Three Ages” was a kind of parody.

“Intolerance” had its own inspiration, at least in terms of scale, in Giovanni Pastrone’s lavish 1914 “Cabiria.” But rather than just a bigger and better spectacle, Griffith’s methods yield something like a validation of Pastrone’s avant-garde countrymen, the Futurists. Amid the foment of World War I, their 1916 manifesto praised cinema’s ability “to give the intelligence a prodigious sense of simultaneity and omnipresence” — the very month that “Intolerance” opened in New York.

“This is a film that has been around for almost a hundred years, and it’s a textbook,” said Tim Lanza, the archivist of the Cohen Film Collection, which financed the restoration. “It’s the kind of film that we felt was worth investing in because it’s going to be around for another hundred years.”

The influence of “Intolerance” can still be felt in more recent imitators of its multistrand approach, including “Inception,” “Cloud Atlas” and Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster” cycle.

At the time, however, “Intolerance” received mixed reviews and did not catch on with audiences, even as “The Birth of a Nation” was revived repeatedly. Griffith tinkered with “Intolerance” into the 1920s. The Cohen release, featuring a new score by Carl Davis, aims to get closer to these versions. (A 1989 restoration harked back to the film’s form at its New York premiere.)

Griffith continued to work in film after “Intolerance,” but in time Hollywood came to have little use for this pioneer. Restored to the big screen, the film surprises even today with its vitality.

“It’s on the edge of madness,” Mr. Brownlow said. “But so is genius.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR11 of the New York edition with the headline: Birth of Another Spectacle, and Its Life. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe